i don’t really want to talk about the hockey situation in vancouver. instead, i’d like to talk about me being the cutest thing ever. just kidding.
\nlast night as i was getting ready for bed, my mind, running its last laps for the day, stumbled upon an epiphany of sorts. i’ve mentioned paul here before, not often and not in any great detail. he was my first really physical relationship. he was brilliant and funny and knew all sorts of things i’d never even thought of. he was tall and dark and his voice was like chocolate. i became completely besotted. i very probably loved him in whatever capacity i had at that time in my life.
\npaul’s got some issues, though. yeah, i know, don’t we all? his biggest one, at the time i knew him, was that he couldn’t ever love anyone. i surmised, even then, that it was a defense mechanism to keep him from being hurt emotionally as he had been by his ex-girlfriend. totally understandable, right? we all do that to some degree or another. but, paul being the guy he is, with the conviction of concrete and the ability to hold a grudge longer than polyester holds the smell of sweat, wouldn’t let it go.
\none night, we were on his bed. he lying down, me sitting up and stroking his long fingers. i don’t remember what we were talking about, or if we were talking at all, but at one point his eyes started to get very blue and it looked like he was about to cry. my heart melted. the man who shunned all emotion was thawing! i thought it was a moment of breakthrough for our relationship, that maybe it would bring us closer, that he might come to show me the emotion i so desperately wanted.
\ni was wrong. that was the moment that things started to turn. sadly, i didn’t realize it for almost a year, but that’s another story. the moment that i thought might mean he was ready to let me in actually started the process of him shutting me out completely. i believe that that one instance of vulnerability completely terrified him. the thought of having someone sitting there, wanting nothing more than to love him utterly was something he was just not able to deal with. it scared the shit out of him, so he started to shut down.
\nbut that’s just the background. my epiphany came when i realized that i had the exact same reaction when morgan first told me he loved me. i wasn’t able to accept that he was standing there, willing and wanting to love me unconditionally. it was completely foreign to me. he might as well have been handing me a piece of uranium for how much i wanted to accept what he was offering. not because of him, but because i wasn’t capable of accepting the idea that someone could want to love me.
\nfrom the moment that he first said “i love you” i started to pull away. i may have told myself i wasn’t, i may have told him i wasn’t, but i can see now that i was. i did. if i had been a little more open with myself and him i might have been able to salvage at least a little good feeling out of the relationship, but i wasn’t. i didn’t. that’s my mistake.
\nthere’s no real point to my epiphany other than acheiving another level of awareness about myself and how i react to different situations in my life. obviously, i need to start working on opening myself up to the possibilty of being loved by someone. that being loved doesn’t mean i have to love them back. it doesn’t mean i owe them anything because they feel that way about me. i have to learn to let them feel how they do and not let that change how i relate to them. mostly, i have to learn to be more forthright with how i<\/i> feel in situations where i am uncomfortable. to be more open and honest instead of taking the coward’s way out and pulling back or shutting down. that’s passive-aggressive bullshit no one needs in their life.
\nyeah, i’m still a work in progress. don’t forget your hard hat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
i don’t really want to talk about the hockey situation in vancouver. instead, i’d like to talk about me being the cutest thing ever. just kidding. last night as i was getting ready for bed, my mind, running its last laps for the day, stumbled upon an epiphany of sorts. i’ve mentioned paul here before, …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fubsy.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fubsy.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fubsy.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fubsy.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fubsy.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fubsy.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fubsy.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fubsy.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fubsy.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}